New Poetry: Filiocht Nua

DERRYNANE, 2005

It was well after seven, but how could we leave? It would have been
like spitting in the face of God. A cormorant surfaced and dived,
surfaced and dived, blue shadows lay down in the scuffled footprints,
the long, glass waves curled over and broke into spatters of light.
Yellow rattle, eyebright, bedstraw, sea holly, milkwort.
Nobody there but us. We stayed on—the pale sand, the evening,
the islands all turning smoke-blue and floating away—
stayed as we'd done so often before, but might not again, the times
being frailer, everything being frailer. Old ways
fall away, the cormorant's wings beat black on the water,
the world's going spinning off to God-knows-where.

FLOOD

Each time I pass there are more swans.
A sedgey field at the best of times.
And the little hills, circling.
And the sag of the sky.

A slow file of cows
treads through a gap in the thorns
under a blaze of white light
that spills through a gap in the sky.

More swans, more water.
The coil of their necks
as they loop and they stretch,
as they puddle the rushy pasture.

Nine today—and the shine
of the low, cold light
on the stretch of the flood—
nine in the wet, mossed grass.

Each time I pass there is more water.
More water, more swans.
And cows, trudging up the green hill.
And the big-bellied sky, great with rain.

GALE FORECAST

A hard wind
raids from the sea.

My mother's, a storm gull,
blown over the strand,

Her bones gone hollow and light
and ready for flight.

COUNTRYMEN

for Jim Barco

We were sitting in the Abbey waiting,
and he was telling me, low-voiced,
about their week-old spaniel pups,
the one with the tail that was two-thirds brown,
white only near the tip.

If he did it right, he said,
if he cut for the flash,
she'd be like the mother, her tail over-long,
always bloody after hunting,
ribboned
by furze and briar—
Ah, to hell with the theory,
the theory and the purists.
Blaze or no blaze, he'd cut her short.
He'd not see her hurt like Jess.

It was November,
the old year was slipping, the new one
drawing closer.
There were monks drifting through,
you could feel them—uncertain,
pressed close to the walls and in the worn places—
summoned to mark these eight hundred years
of the Abbey's grey stones in the valley.

He would do it himself?
He would, he said. A hot knife—fast—the heat sealing
the cut flesh. His hands mimed
the knife and the pup, I watched them.
the swift, sure cut,
against the dark wood, the monks drawing in
for a better look. I thought of our pups—
warm flesh-sacks, they'd jumped in my hands
as the clippers closed, and of the small bloody heap
on the vet's table. The monks were remembering
the oddness of hands, smells, blood, you could feel them
growing focused, denser, remembering
the body's red roar
         and the past stretching back
till it slid off the edge of time and the world,
and always a dog and a man—
through first light, through last light—
a man and a dog moving always together.

SONG

So, here comes Winter, crying her power and her glory,
mocking at flesh, choosing bones for her bridal sheaf.

Bones, and the old bell-sounds of the stag, Hunger,
roaming about in the hills. Winter

that thins out the light and thickens the dark
and stills the running sound of water. Winter

that is broken only and over and over
by the dark speck, Seed, lodged at her heart.

THE TURN

That was the day he made Death go from him,
though she was beautiful, crowned with white bones,

her robe stuck with seed-pearls, dried petals of lilies,
her...